♂Jacques Girouard

Jacques Girouard (born about 1648, died 27 October 1703) was a farmer of Port-Royal in Acadia, the son of one of the colony’s founding settlers, who with his wife Marguerite Gautrot raised a family of fourteen children there. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014) by two separate lines of descent, through his sons Pierre Giroard and Guillaume Giroir.

Early life

Jacques was the son of Francois Girouard and Jeanne Aucoin, among the first French families of Port-Royal; Bona Arsenault^W’s 1955 compilation has Francois arriving in Acadia about 1640. The census of 1671, the first nominal census of the colony, lists him under the form “Jacob”, the Latin and biblical equivalent of Jacques, and gives his age as 23, which places his birth about 1648.

Marriage and family

By 1671 Jacques had married Marguerite Gautrot, then 17, a daughter of the early settler Francois Gautrot; a compiled genealogy places the marriage about 1670 at Port-Royal. The same census counts him twice: once as a married son in his parents’ household, and again at the head of his own, as “Jacob Girouard, farmer, 23”, with his wife, one son, Alexandre, whose age was not recorded, seven head of cattle and three sheep, and no land. Marguerite was not the only one of her father’s daughters to stand in this family’s ancestry: her half-sister Marie Gautrot (born about 1637) and her sister Marie Gautrot (born about 1647) are also ancestors of Floyd Amatus Delahorne, so Francois Gautrot stands in his family tree through three of his daughters, by five separate lines of descent.

The census of 1686, as transcribed in Arsenault’s compilation, finds “Jacques Girouard, 38 ans, fils de Francois”, still at Port-Royal with Marguerite, 32, “fille de Francois Gauterot”, and nine children, seven sons and two daughters, the eldest Alexandre, aged 16, and the youngest, Guillaume, only three months old. Their son Pierre was then 14. Pierre later settled at Pisiguit^W, the parish of the Assomption on the Minas Basin, and when he married for the second time in 1709 the register described his parents, Jacques and Marguerite, as “habitans de Port Royal”.

The family stayed at Port-Royal and grew with each count. In 1693 the census gives Jacques, 46, and Marguerite, 39, with eleven children. In August 1695 the heads of household of Port-Royal swore an oath of allegiance to King William III, and a published transcription of the oath shows Jacques’s mark on it. In 1698, at 50, he had twelve children at home, the youngest six months old, and in 1701, at 52, nine children still at home.

Arsenault’s compilation follows two more of the sons: Alexandre, who married Marie LeBorgne de Bellisle, and Jacques, who married Anne Petitpas, both still living in 1714. Alexandre’s marriage rests on the compilation and has not been matched against the registers; Jacques’s is confirmed by the Port-Royal register, as described below.

Death and children

The register of Port-Royal records the burial, on 28 October 1703, of “Jacob Girouard”, who had died on 27 October. The entry gives no age, parents or spouse, so the identification rests on the name and the date. A compiled genealogy places the death of Jacques, called Jacob, at Port-Royal in October 1703, and the marriage acts of his children name him as dead by 1704, so the entry most likely records him.

Five of his children are named in marriage acts of the same register, each giving Jacques Girouard, deceased, and Marguerite Gautrot as parents: Jacques, who married Anne Petitpas in 1704; François, who married Anne Bourgeois in 1708; Claude, who married Isabelle Blanchard in 1709; Magdelaine, who married Pierre Richard in 1712; and Charles, who married Anne Bastarache in 1713. When the son Jacques married again in 1725, as the widower of Anne Petitpas, the act gave his age as 52, which places his birth about 1673. Pierre Giroard also had sons named Claude, Charles and Jacques, who belong to the next generation and are not these five.

Lines of descent

One line of descent to Floyd Amatus Delahorne runs through Jacques’s son Pierre Giroard and Pierre’s son Claude Giroir; the other runs through his son Guillaume Giroir and Guillaume’s daughter Anne Girouard (born 1729). Guillaume’s place as a son of Jacques and Marguerite rests on census evidence alone. The lines meet again when Leonard Thibodeau married Madeleine Ordalie Cormier on 16 December 1845 in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, both descendants of Jacques Girouard; they were the grandparents of Floyd’s grandmother Amelia Pennison Daigle.

Notes

The records spell the family name in several ways, among them Giroire, Girouar and Giroüard, and Marguerite’s surname as Gotrot or Gauterot.

The marriage

The date of about 1670 and the place come from Steven A. Cormier’s compilation, The Acadians of Louisiana: A Synthesis, which gives the marriage at Port-Royal in about 1670. The 1671 census already shows the couple married, which fits that date.

The 1695 oath

Roberta Estes’s blog transcription of the 1695 oath of allegiance gives the mark as “Marque de (+) Jacob Girouer”. The transcription is of a reproduced document, not of a register entry.